i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture next wednesday is the first presidential debate and as of now it's a duel between obama and romney the libertarian candidate for president gary johnson is trying to show them three is not a crowd. i would johnson's you judge jim gray also despite multiple national polls showing president obama pulling away from mitt romney in the swing states and

nationwide romney camp says they're not concerned cept wind optimism or they know something the rest of america doesn't last our panel in the night's long liberal rumble and did president bush really quote biblical scripture when he tried to convince the new french president jacques chirac to go to war with iraq as just one of the many questions were posed to kurt eichenwald in a special edition of conversations with great minds. you need to know this remember this debate from one thousand nine hundred ninety two. you can move your factor south to better have dollar an hour for labor our young twenty five that's a son you've been in business for a long time you got to throw one full pay a dollar an hour for your labor. have no health care that's most expensive single element making a car have no environmental controls no pollution controls and no retirement. if

you don't care about anything but make the money there will be a challenge sucking sound going south so that was ross perot warning the nation about nafta it was also the last time a third party candidate was given a voice during the presidential debates and frankly the nation should have listened to him he was right and the two major party candidates that year bill clinton george herbert walker bush were dead wrong about the devastation nafta would cause to american jobs and our manufacturing base in the decades that followed the point though is that third even fourth and fifth parties voices are critical for a highly functioning democracy which brings us to the campaign of libertarian presidential candidate gary johnson johnson filed a lawsuit last week alleging that both democrats and republicans are breaking antitrust laws and conspiring to keep third party candidates out of the debates and those out of the us presidency currently debate rules set by both parties only

allow for a candidate polling of fifteen percent to be allowed to participate in most major polls do not even include thirty party candidates as the suit reads and agreeing to these rules to exclude the plaintiff from participating in the debates the defendants are conspiring and contract to restrain the plate is from participating in the electoral process johnson is hoping the court will issue a temporary restraining order putting a hold to all presidential debates until all constitutionally eligible candidates or including me are included excuse me joining me now for more on this is judge jim gray the libertarian party's vice presidential candidate and running mate gary johnson judge gray welcome to the program. well tom thank you and the big picture indeed this is what we say that the voters should be entitled to the big picture because today of course romney and obama are so much the same on so many issues they are on one side governor gary johnson is on the other we need to be in these debates to give that big picture to the voters and let them show what their

alternatives are fun to be with you so thank you tell us about this lawsuit and i'm curious how do you place this as an anti-trust laws suit when the sherman act of one thousand nine hundred one was pretty specific it was about corporations and the supreme court you know over centuries has separated corporate behavior from political behavior political being the most protected. well we're talking about the republicans that are certainly in in that position and we're talking about the democrats as well and then we're talking about their brainchild which is the presidential debates commission which is also a separate entity and we're talking about antitrust as you know them tom the the purpose of the antitrust laws is not to shield to protect competitors it's to protect competition and what more important competition do we have in our country then the competition to decide who will be president of the united states i'm not i'm not disagreeing with you at all on that i'm listening at our level i just that

you know i've read the sherman act and it's specifically about corporate behavior are you suggesting is the basis of your lawsuit that these political party i know that they're corporator do you think that they qualify and i'm not trying to argue this with them genuinely trying to understand this. gotcha no i certainly do i think first of all that you remember of pat buchanan and. nader were arguing that. they were they were public companies and then the law came down in the court said no they're private well if they're private then they are in and i competitive mode to freeze out non republicans and democrats and that's exactly what they're doing it is and i competitive it does affect commerce it does affect trade as much or anything that then anyone can come up with i'm really confident that when the court really digs into this that they will see this instead of them being able to decide arbitrarily to push the bar up to fifteen percent on polls that they don't even disclose which polls and which times the more appropriate standard would be any

political party that is on enough votes technically to win enough electoral college votes to win the presidency should be included in those debates but as far as i know there's only the libertarian party we are on at least forty eight ballots plus are states plus the district of columbia so this is going to just bring in governor gary johnson who by the way still has the most qualified person to be president the united states that i know of let's let that voice be heard well i hope your effort is successful and i'm all in favor of more voices in our electoral process let's talk about the libertarian party you are here by nominate you to be on the central district court of california who will argue it to you you know i. and this one topic we may agree the libertarian party let's talk about that the party has been on record as far back as when david koch ran for the same office you are as the party's v.p. back in one thousand nine hundred as saying that we should turn social security and medicare over to the banks toure's we should do away with public parks and unemployment insurance we should privatized our schools even our roads that's all

pretty far out of the mainstream of american political thought do you expect the party will ever moderate its views or do you think that the american people will want to move america on that's not our head though those are simply not our views and they're not. abuse it all we need government of course we do we need regulation of course we do by the way i'll be the first peace corps volunteer to be elected to national office i care about people we will have a safety net but the difference is that the federal government be the last resort instead of the first resort and we're not going to sell our national parks and we're certainly not as far as social security is concerned we're libertarians we believe in contract now aside from the fact of course that congress has literally been lying to the people for decades about this lockbox it's a pay as you go system nevertheless we have a program of even written about it tom in which everybody from fifty to seventy which will probably have to raise the eligibility levels to seventy but everyone will get exactly what they've been promised and people maybe from thirty five to

fifty can opt out of the system if they want to and go to a private system where in the make more money and then people below thirty can opt out right away and go into conservative investments overseen by some conservative investors and they can choose among those who are talking about social security as if it is a retirement program it is not a retirement program fully a third of social security revenues go to pay for literally orphans widows and disabled people and the remaining two there is that are spent it's insurance against poverty in old age it's not a retirement program. we will as i say we believe in contract and when people have been promised something with regard to contract they will receive it but we will change it over because as you know when social security was put into effect there were several hundred people who were working that paid for each one person of eligibility now it's less than three to one so it's out of money it's going to be out of money it's time to address it now before it even gets worse than it is we will do that but i promise you and promise anyone who's listening that anyone

that's promised something will get what they were products no i don't want to turn this into a debate about social security but let's just go through that list you know my understanding is and we've certainly had a lot of libertarians on this on this program and and i participated in a libertarian party back in the seventy's is that the libertarian party has always felt the social security was basically socialism that it should be operated under private contract between individuals and private corporations when did the party change its position on. no we haven't where you would privatized that except that and this is governor johnson and me this is our campaign that we would make various cut offs as to which age limit resit over time you want to private thomas they will come out ahead ok and the same thing with a lot of kaiser act. over time either you need to bring competition you just can't do this and soundbites tom that medicare you need to bring competition back into the health care field look i don't know how old you are but what i was raised in

the fifty's early sixty's it wasn't even a topic of conversation that we can't find reasonable medicare for reasonable health care for reasonable prices we weren't closing emergency rooms just not on the radar then the federal government starts getting involved and now we're in a real mess and i'll ask you in our end our viewers do you want to have the department of motor vehicles run your health care because that's exactly where we're going well sort of sinhalese for myself i'd say act but you know if you if you ask me i say if a crisis and that's the important if the choice is between the d.m.v. or the guy who makes over a billion dollars as the c.e.o. of united health care i'd take the d.m.v. but i get it you take united health care jim gray were hard hit with that were flat out of time but thank you for joining us tonight. absolutely let's get it done i indeed.

it's ones that are you ready to rumble joining me for tonight's low liberal rabble are judson phillips associate director of the tea party dot net and founder of tea party nation and marc harrold libertarian commentator attorney and author welcome to both of you joe thank you and you we just have just two minutes real quick talk here and will pick up some more after the break i just interviewed judge jim gray it's been twenty years since we had a third party that had a voice in the debate what sort of election reforms you know without getting to the issues what sort of election reforms judson do you think that we should have so that we can have third parties whether we like them or not what involved it's green party or the libertarian for a third party to be involved it's got to be a certain threshold you've got to have a certain all the democrats a set that a fifteen percent that seems crazy to me i didn't seem crazy to me because if you set it low enough you're going to have so many voices out there that you're not going to be able to make an intelligent decision so we'd be like france and israel and pretty much every other democracy in the world well no we're not every other democracy in the world we're constitutionally we're probably should have

a two party system we would it's not what i think right now we have a two party system if you get a third party candidate say like perot twenty years ago who is polling at twenty percent all right by all means he should be included but when you have somebody basically bought his way into that i mean he was he was the eccentric billionaire who he had the money to do all that plus he had a message mark perot was actually right on nafta in my opinion anyway i'm not sure yours yeah i think we need more people dr jill stein should be on the debate stage gary johnson i certainly think should be on the debate stage if you aren't enough ballots i think dr jill stein is on thirty eight gary johnson currently on forty eight if you mathematically can get to seventy if you mathematically can win the election if you're in enough states where if you want all those states that you could win the election i think that's the litmus test i think fifteen percent is too high and i think you need to use suggestion i agree with it and i don't want. stan really i understand there's logistical and pragmatic concerns with having this you know debate with hundreds of people in it but there are certainly common sense you know that we can do for that with a strong litmus test like i've set forth but where others have set forth is not my litmus test but the bottom line is i don't think we can have too many voices i

don't really understand economics i guess i do many voices in an election that's not a big problem to me at a ballot and a plurality of states or a majority of states are just ten seconds the reality is it's either going to be obama or romney winning this election that's all most folks including me i want to hear from those two and if we don't change it'll always be one of those two ok more rubble after the break. download the official ati application to cell phone choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorites from atsushi t.v. is not required to watch on t.v. all you need is your mobile device to watch r.t. any time of the.

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welcome back to tonight's lone liberal rumble joining me are judson phillips associate director of the tea party dot net and founder of tea party nation and marc harrold libertarian commentator attorney and author let's get back to it it president obama is leading over mitt romney and it's growing significantly in key battleground states with less than six weeks to go to the election the new york times c.b.s. news quinnipiac all these polls have the president leading romney an average between among those polls of fifty three to forty four in florida fifty three to forty three in ohio fifty four forty two in pennsylvania meanwhile conservative

media like drudge is reporting that the race is a dead heat forty six to forty six so and here's the example that you can see from today's drudge report so what's going on here either either you guys have a theory about why the entire right wing blogosphere and talk radio sphere and everything is saying it's even it's neck and neck there's still a chance romney can win and all the other polls are saying sorry it's over well one of my favorite quotes is there's lies there's damn lies and then there's political polls and. you know it all seriousness you can take a poll and make it say anything you want to depending on how you load it with democrats republicans independents the looting this green with the argument the limbaugh and some of these others are making that they're oversampling democrats from everything i have read that appears to be happening it looks like they're basing a lot of their modeling on two thousand and why i would as it goes mark why would people who are professional pollsters who have a professional reputation and you know in the best libertarian tradition must produce

a decent product or they're not going to exist the next time there's an election why would they do that why would they do something i don't know that they would set out to do that i mean you have the margin of error differ margins of errors will allow for different computations but whether they're oversampling certain people i mean what i've heard credible reports just that's the way they collect the information how they contact people who are most likely to. encounter just the model the paradigm of their poll does that i think you know it's hard for me to say that i really believe the drudge is right on this one i mean i don't think it's a dead heat is i don't think i see it really thinks it's a dead heat but maybe it's to keep it interesting i mean i hate to think that anybody's pragmatic enough to just go out just to keep it interesting just to sell papers just to keep people involved but if that's what's going on obviously that's a real threat to you are you are it is that you are instead you are i don't i'm not asserting well what's happening i will assert that i did you i did sell you time i've been watching this business for decades and and the more and more news has become a business rather than a calling the more and more it's been do whatever he watch over the course of the election somebody is down the other guy gets beaten down somebodies up that guy

gets beat and you know they try to keep it a horse race right up to the very end because then they get more advertising dollars although this year it almost doesn't seem to matter because karl rove in that chamber of already you know all these billionaires have already dedicated all his money is it possible though that the reason why the right wing sphere is saying it's a dead heat is so that when romney loses they can claim that the election was stolen by all those illegals who showed up at the polls or you know that obama is not a legitimate president they'll be a rationale then for four years four more years of fighting him on everything because he's not legitimate well i don't think i don't think obama's going to get a second term but be the big picture if i could borrow a phrase here i think what you're seeing here is the death of an a for lack of a better term a bi partisan media the media is becoming on both sides more hyper partisan you have c.b.s. m.s.n. b.c. they're all but b. c. in particular all the cheerleading for obama. and fox it's all though i miss them i

see at least you've got joe scarborough in the morning and i know of no an analog to that it. is on the five but but but but you've got the news me doesn't quite have his own show for about three hours scarborough's got other people there too but what the. you have this increasing divide in the media you're saying why is drudge coming up with all this who are conservatives coming up with all these numbers we have this increasing partisan divide in the media now that may not be a bad thing because i believe in the competition of ideas best ideas get over what i'm saying is that you got all these people all these groups that claim not to have a partisan agenda who are saying obama is just beating romney terribly and there's actually good reasons for like that forty seven percent comment you know you can see in the polls how that hurt him and yet you've got drudge coming out here and others in the right wing saying oh everything's fine it's going to be fifty fifty it seems to me like this is all about the after the election day spin i don't know mark you it could be i don't see that much conspiracy and or that much forethought

and i think that the news is definite become partisan i mean people like to seem to like to watch a lot of news they agree with and the people that really sit around watching four and five hours of news a day have strong opinions they're usually to the left or usually the right they're going to gravitate towards that channel it's hard to sell news in the middle people have they seem to want their news infused with opinion they won't watch just straight anchored news and that's why the networks so you're suggesting that the polls showing obama's ahead are political no i'm not at all i really you know i don't know enough about the inside i don't see the same conspiracy than you do but what i'm saying is i think certain people taken polls are not completely neutral and objective take all the conspiracy out to see it is not in the polling it's in the lead there is a war to exploit. or i think it's in the reporting judson and under the theory the best explanation is often the simplest explanation is or is are exactly sometimes people are just simply wrong and we'll see what happens i mean when we'll see with twelve states the use of electronic voting machines and no paper trail that's a whole separate wait until the hacktivists on the left get all of those that

anyhow but we got it we got to wrap it up judson mark thank you both as always thank you. it's increasingly looking like the united states is one generation away from completely forgetting what privacy me it's and the consequences of this great forgetting will be tragic for our nation why because without private privacy without the ability to be anonymous america can't even plan a peaceful revolution or nonviolent progressive social change movements or conservative social change movements for that matter because of big corporations or big brother are watching they can block efforts before they even become public in recent years we've learned about the massive surveillance systems being built by

the corporate state for example we now know about the warrantless wiretapping of american citizens post nine eleven we know now about trap trap wire a law enforcement tool that keeps track of our movements in major cities across the nation's hoopla circuit cameras facial recognition software and license plate readers and we know of the enormous spy center being built right now by the n.s.a. in utah it's going to house enormous amounts of data collected by the n.s.a. since nine eleven virtually everybody's e-mails phone calls text messages and more all of it one source so it's easily analyzed the n.s.a. can now hold the digital version of five hundred quintillion pages of text here's what that number would look like spelled out. it's a lot of data what's worse americans are increasingly willing to give the surveillance state and snoopy corporations anything they want today we're sacrificing privacy for convenience and interconnection we posed our locations our

pictures our personal information on sites like facebook and twitter all of which are monitored by the corporate surveillance state and those corporations themselves your web experience is now cured fully compiled examined and fine tuned so advertising can target you specifically how do advertisers know what you want because they've been collecting data on what websites you go to and what you search for on hundreds of websites and search engines a blatant in my opinion violation of individual privacy online data collection is now a multi billion dollar industry this level of surveillance would have been unthinkable for previous generations including our founding fathers who held privacy in the highest regards including the right to privacy that they enshrined in the fourth amendment of the bill of rights and arguably in the third amendments will but today we're all just accepting these invasions of our privacy although in europe they are

not accepted citizens in other democracies aren't as naive or as acid does americans under pressure from the european union facebook announced that it scrappiness facial recognition software and deleting all the data derived from it but here in the united states facebook continues to use facial recognition software despite complaints from groups like the electronic privacy information center we simply don't have the laws that are needed here in the united states to protect privacy online and as long as advertisers can make money off knowing your habits and secrets we never will because citizens united gave those advertisers the right to buy your member of congress as the nonpartisan congressional research service report warns there is no comprehensive federal privacy statute that protects personal. information instead a patchwork of federal laws and regulations govern the collection and disclosure of personal information and has been addressed by congress on a sector by sector basis some contend that this patchwork of laws and regulations

is insufficient to meet the demands of today's technology you know in europe there's a bill of rights for on line users known as the data protection directive and new laws are regularly coming down the pike in europe to give even more protections to online users and to enforce heavy fines on corporations or governments that violate individual privacy europe knows this is a serious problem. we need to as well. social change hinges on privacy and in some cases on anonymity this goes all the way back to the boston tea party when an anonymous activist known to this day merely as rustic has posted flyers around boston to lead directly to the boston tea party in today's america rustic is would have been exposed to the boston tea party probably shut down before it even started in today's america people couldn't have conspired to overthrow unjust laws from slavery to giving women rights to civil rights to ending the wars

in vietnam and iraq yes social media was a tremendous booth for both the boost for both the occupy movement and the arab spring to get people into the streets but it was also just as tremendous a tool for law enforcement in both parts of the world to work to quash those it's as journalist chris hedges points out it's all about criminalizing dissent tragically the day may come indeed it may already be here when if you plan to protest the corporate takeover of our government drone warfare or intentional or indefinite detention if you are protesting those things you'll find yourself in jail before you even get into the streets seem impossible just ask the people planning protests of the r n c in minneapolis in two thousand and eight the bush administration had them take it out before they could even publicly speak out it's getting more and more difficult and more and more dangerous to launch successful socially transformational movements because the powers that be including the

corporations or industries you may be protesting against know ahead of time with all your moves are going to be yes it's annoying to receive ads online or even have an embarrassing picture you post on facebook but that should be the least of our worries when it comes to online privacy the fundamental ability for we the people to create social change and lead nonviolent revolutionary movements against unjust oppressive forces is always in danger when. nation loses its privacy protections the fight for privacy will be one of the signature battles moving forward during uncertain times in america and without privacy and the ability to remain anonymous that goes along with it genuine democracy will never again flourish in the land of the free for more information and to join this fight for privacy go to the electronic privacy information center is website at epic u.p.i. c dot org. coming up over the last eleven years it's been a question asked hundreds of times could not eleven but of have been preventive of

the bush administration had acted on the intelligence they had at the time of course not eleven did it happen a bush took us to war with iraq shortly thereafter what was the planning for the iraq war really like inside the white house and what roles to be united states' closest ally play in it ask investigative journalist kurt eichenwald special edition conversations. three couldn't take three years for charges. arrangement three. three stooges free. download free brought us closer video for your media project a free media done to our teeth dot com.

more news today violence is once again flared up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. trying to corporations rule today .